richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

360 THE GOD. DELUSION
evidence for the existence of purgatory is this. If the dead simply
went to heaven or hell on the basis of their sins while on Earth,
there would be no point in praying for them. 'For why pray for the
dead, if there be no belief in the power of prayer to afford solace to
those who as yet are excluded from the sight of God.' And we do
pray for the dead, don't we? Therefore purgatory must exist,
otherwise our prayers would be pointless! Q.E.D. This seriously is
an example of what passes for reasoning in the theological mind.
That remarkable non sequitur is mirrored, on a larger scale, in
another common deployment of the Argument from Consolation.
There must be a God, the argument goes, because, if there were not,
life would be empty, pointless, futile, a desert of meaninglessness
and insignificance. How can it be necessary to point out that the
logic falls at the first fence? Maybe life is empty. Maybe our prayers
for the dead really are pointless. To presume the opposite is to presume
the truth of the very conclusion we seek to prove. The alleged
syllogism is transparently circular. Life without your wife may very
well be intolerable, barren and empty, but this unfortunately
doesn't stop her being dead. There is something infantile in the
presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children,
God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life
meaning and point. It is all of a piece with the infantilism of those
who, the moment they twist their ankle, look around for someone
to sue. Somebody else must be responsible for my well-being, and
somebody else must be to blame if I am hurt. Is it a similar
infantilism that really lies behind the 'need' for a God? Are we back
to Binker again?
The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful,
as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can
make it very wonderful indeed. If science gives consolation of a
non-material kind, it merges into my final topic, inspiration.
INSPIRATION
This is a matter of taste or private judgement, which has the slightly
unfortunate effect that the method of argument I must employ is